I didn’t realize you were restricting the discussion to 20th century designs. The phrase “never fails” suggested a broader context to me.
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German and Nazi Germany used a guillotine-like device up until 1945.
With considerable eh, success I might add. Hundreds of executions and no problems, as far as I recall though if you want some detailed knowledge they have a whole thread about it on the Axis History forum.
There is a huge difference with a death caused by a natural accident or self inflicted suicide and one caused by a murderer who decides that he has the right to destroy an innocent person and his family. If you feel the murder should get to live he should not be entitled to get away with it just because we cannot bring back the dead. He should have to work a difficult life (much as the mother here would have to), but of course under prison conditions. Why should society now have to pick up the tab for his actions ?? He should work to help support thr family he destroyed and should not be comfortable. Why do people feel that just because doing xxxxxxx will not bring someone back that it becomes okay to let them get away with it? if you intentionally destroy a priceless museaum artifact, guess what? They will not let you walk out the front door just because they have no way to buy another.
@jerwin The Wikipedia article is discussing the behaviour of Sodium Thiopental at a non-lethal dose.
Following intravenous injection, the drug rapidly reaches the brain and causes unconsciousness within 30–45 seconds. At one minute, the drug attains a peak concentration of about 60% of the total dose in the brain. Thereafter, the drug distributes to the rest of the body, and in about 5–10 minutes the concentration is low enough in the brain such that consciousness returns.
when used therapeutically, the dose of sodium thiopental immediately after injection is designed to be high enough to render a patient unconscious, but as the drug spreads from being just in the blood to being in all tissues, the concentration drops to a level that allows conciousness to return.
When sodium thiopental is used in an execution setting, the dose is massively above the therapeutic level, such that even after the drug has redistributed to all the body tissues, the level present is sufficient to maintain unconsciousness. In such cases, the drug typically takes 12 hours to clear - and the recipient would need mechanical ventilation during this time so as not to asphyxiate.
If the prison service were able to administer the drug correctly, there would be no danger of waking up within 40 minutes. The problem is that they’re not competent and also that the death penalty is wrong on principle. The bizarre thing is that Europe at least in Switzerland has Euthanasia clinics that are able to function.
It’s called Fallbeil. A variant of the guillotine with a shorter fall but heavier blade.
… and after all those “experiences” we made with killing people between '33 - '45, we (Germany and Europe) decided that it’s a bad idea to allow the state to kill people. That’s a lesson WW2 taught us that some countries apparently missed.
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. Swine in particular are regarded as an excellent model of human cardiopulmonary and cerebrovascular physiology, with comparable size, body composition, and brain perfusion rates [40]. Comparing the HED for thiopental anesthesia in swine to lethal injection dosages, we conclude that at least some inmates at the lower end of the thiopental dose range might have experienced fleeting or no surgical anesthesia, while others at the higher end of the range might have received doses predicted to induce more prolonged anesthesia (Table 1). Such a prediction is impossible to evaluate, however, because any evidence of suffering would be masked by the effects of pancuronium.
It IS an argument for the Guillotine: fast, virtually painless, and effective. Of course, thanks to Robespierre, not terribly politically acceptable.
On the other hand, there is always the Niven Scenario: sedate them, and dis-assemble them for transplaints… .
That’s really the thing isn’t it? In order to be competent, you need to be a medical doctor. As far as I’m aware M.D.'s aren’t into killing their patients. I’ve often wondered how the doctor overseeing a lethal injection squares their actions with the hippocratic oath (which translates in part “I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel;”), and the overall standards of their profession.
Didn’t hinder people like Mr. James Mitchell helping to improve torture (esp. waterboarding) for the CIA. They’re doing it for “'Murrica” (and money probably).
Well, apparently the doctors wear full body ‘bunnysuits’ and face masks as disguises,
I suspect that executions could be carried out painlessly and in a verifiable fashion without much complication or need of trained medical competence - make a gas tent large enough to contain the inmate, and flood it with an inert gas such as nitrogen or SF6 mixed with 5% CO2 to prompt a breathing response, Have three redundant gas cylinders to supply the gases, fit three pulse oximeters onto the fingers of the condemned for redundant monitoring, have three oxygen level sensors mounted near their head. Make a test run in the day before the execution proper to verify that the O2 level near the mouth can be held below 5% for 30 minutes.
There are studies made with pigs, in which a hopper is filled with chopped apples and flooded with nitrogen, and the pigs are able to put their heads in the hoppers to eat the apples - until the lack of oxygen causes them to pass out. The pigs that recover then resume eating the apples in the nitrogen ambient, e.g. they don’t sense anything particularly untoward about the lack of oxygen in the air they are breathing, and the sensation is not so adverse that they will avoid it compared to the fairly moderate pleasure of eating apples.
There are documented cases at NASA and in the oil industry where people have walked into rooms full of nitrogen and passed out, then died without realising anything untoward was happening, so it’s a ‘solvable’ problem from the purely technical side - bottled gases are manufactured in the USA, Europe could not enforce a blockade.
It could even be ‘twitterified’ so that the apparatus tweets #pushingupdasies each time an execution is carried out. A perfect Raspberry Pi / Arduino project for a rather sadistic high-school science fair.
Except that it involves displaying and acting on a complete antipathy for fellow human beings, I’d be lobbying each of the 37 states for contracts to design, build and service such apparatus.
Heroin is produced outside of the legitimate pharmaceutical industry, is said to have pleasant effects, and is lethal in sufficiently high doses. If states insist on killing people using drugs then using seized illicit drugs obtained without the participation of anyone in the healthcare industry would be a reasonable way of doing it.
Well, “painless” in a way, perhaps. Eye witness accounts say that heads sometimes try to mouth words for a few seconds after falling off… Your brain is still there and it’s got enough oxygen to keep going for a very short time, which I have a feeling will be pretty much worse than the most horrific experience you can imagine. I’ve heard an explanation of why it is unlikely that people consciously experience anything after being decapitated at some point, but it strikes me that since we don’t even know what consciousness is, physically speaking, there’s not way to guarantee that.
EDIT: As above, I think the solution is to not kill people, and that if we are going to, we might as well not kid ourselves that death can be fine.
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The problem with using gas is that unless you have some way to sneak it into the cage in the cell in the middle of the night the procedures used are going to make it obvious that you’re being gassed.
If those pigs were strapped to a chair and a bag placed over them, they would know something is up.
As Michael Portillo discovered in “How to kill a human being”, CN gas requires the active cooperation of the condemned in order to be less than cruel. And since it’s an irritant that’s less than likely, Nitrogen Asphyxiation doesn’t. The brain doesn’t know that there’s no oxygen, only that it’s feeling rather giddy. (Normally, in situations of low oxygen, carbon dioxide builds up, which can be detected, but nitrogen asphyxiation subverts this response.) There would probably be a stress response in anticipation of impending death–last meal, last rites,last words, etc-- but the asphyxiation itself would probably not cause any any additional pain or stress-- in theory,
“Alright, you sit in this room. You are going to die, but you won’t even be aware that it’s happening to you. You’ll feel like things are normal, but secretly your body will be suffocating and dying and at some point you’ll just lose consciousness, never to wake up again. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”
(did something so it wasn’t formatted as block text but showed quotation marks - body too similar)
pretty much.
In Japan, the condemned don’t know when they’ll be hanged.
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